Abstract

Opportunities in globalisation has brought with it serious challenges for businesses in all sectors.
Although there have been many success stories, but there has also been some serious challenges in traditional industries. The problems currently facing the UK’s textile and clothing manufacturing industry, particularly its SMEs are a pointer to the degree of adverse utilisation of globalisation opportunities. This paper examines UK apparel industry supply chain structure, examples of successful strategy development through case studies and presents results from their application. It concludes that to fully seize the opportunities presented in globalisation, companies are required to build distinctive capabilities based on a mix of talent (skills) and technology. Thus, companies can only expect to move up the value-chain by innovatively creating a combination of capabilities which require them to deal with and manage business ambiguities- operations which are not governed by rule books and other explicit guides - more effectively.